>  In particular as regards long-term reliability in the context of 
> "wear leveling".

Modern SSDs are as reliable as your average SATA drive.  In the first 
few years, it was the onboard  SSD controllers that caused all the 
problems, and negative experiences. Brands such as OCZ are infamous 
for failures of their first production drives. On the other hand, I 
have had two OCZ Vertex SSDs running in a software RAID 0 
configuration for the last two or three years with no issues what so 
ever. I also have a Intel SSD as my boot drive, that has had no 
issues either. They are all installed on a computer that runs 24/7. 
Intel has probably had the best rep for SSD reliability, although 
Crucial seems to be leading the pack at the moment as the best 
performing drives from a quality manufacture.

One thing you should do is partition and format SSDs in Windows Vista 
or 7 in order to avoid misalignment of the partition. If they are 
misaligned they will still work, but it will effect performance. And 
just like a SATA drive the cooler you can keep them... the better.

I think your concern about wear stems from thinking about them like a 
flash drive. They are not like flash drives. In fact, Microsoft has 
posted in their knowledge base that the best possible place for your 
swap file is, in fact, an SSD. From the Microsoft support pages>>>
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  Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

  Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential
  writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.
  In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on
  pagefile reads and writes, we find that
  Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
  Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or
  equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
  Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to
  128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

  In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable
  performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files
  better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.
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Modern SSDs are capable of handling the countless read writes of 
normal hard drive use. So unless you are trying to preserve your SSD 
for your grandchildren, I won't worry about it.
An SSD is one of the best bang for the buck upgrades you can perform.

Mark Rode

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